Laura Avery

(She/Her)

Laura is inspired by the healing potential of relationship and believes that moving into deepening connections with one another can foster mutual growth and transformation. She is honoured to be walking alongside clients as they explore unexamined aspects of their lives and take risks in experiencing new ways of being. She endeavours to foster a sense of warmth and safety in relationships, in which clients feel that all parts of themselves are welcome, understood, and given space. She believes in collaboration, co-creation, curiosity, and exploration in striving to tailor a therapeutic approach that fits the unique needs of each person that she meets. She recognizes the importance of understanding people’s experiences and challenges in the context of their unique relational, cultural, and social realities.

Laura is passionate about supporting youth and adults who are facing challenges related to stress and anxiety, depression, the effects of trauma and early childhood trauma, grief and loss, relationship challenges (family, romantic, friendship, and work), body image, and concerns related to sexuality and gender identity.

Laura’s counselling work recognizes the interconnection between body, mind, emotions, and spirit. Her work is informed by experiential and somatically oriented counselling approaches, which draw attention to what is unfolding in the “here and now” between the therapist and client, as well as recognize that our bodies are important sources of knowledge. Laura’s approach is integrative and draws on narrative therapy, relational-cultural therapy, emotion-focused therapy, EMDR, and acceptance and commitment therapy. Laura’s therapeutic orientation is supported by her commitment to anti-oppressive and justice-oriented practice. She believes that we cannot understand individual healing without understanding the ways that we may each experience privilege and oppression.

Laura identifies as queer and uses she or they pronouns. Navigating her queer identity over the years has been an invitation for Laura to question dominant cultural narratives that affect the ways we see ourselves and the world, a process that greatly inspires her practice as a counsellor. Laura also has a background in dance and movement and has training in expressive arts therapy which continues to inform her counselling practice by honouring the power of the imagination and our embodied experience. She is a settler of mixed European ancestry, born on the territory of the Semiahmoo people and gratefully resides on the territory of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh First Nations. 

Laura provides counselling in the following offices:

Do you have any questions for Laura?